Virgin Soil

by Ivan S. Turgenev

Translated from the Russian by R. S. Townsend




INTRODUCTION

TURGENEV was the first writer who was able, having both Slavic
and universal imagination enough for it, to interpret modern
Russia to the outer world, and Virgin Soil was the last word of
his greater testament. It was the book in which many English
readers were destined to make his acquaintance about a generation
ago, and the effect of it was, like Swinburne's Songs Before
Sunrise, Mazzini's Duties of Man, and other congenial documents,
to break up the insular confines in which they had been reared
and to enlarge their new horizon. Afterwards they went on to read
Tolstoi, and Turgenev's powerful and antipathetic fellow-
novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he
was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of
his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in
prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as
narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over
his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and
oriental fantasy which belonged to his temperament. He suffered
in youth, and suffered badly, from the romantic malady of his
century, and that other malady of Russia, both expressed in what